| | 'Polar bear' beaten with sack of money at RNC protest
 A "polar bear" collapsed on a St. Paul, Minnesota sidewalk, to be symbolically "finished off" by a man wielding a sack of money as a weapon during a protest outside the Texas delegation's hotel as part of Wednesday's Republican National Convention counter-festivities.
"Less jobs, more wars!" the demonstrators, masked and costumed, chanted as fake currency, corporate logos and the cardboard faces of such figures as Alaska Governor Palin and Senator McCain pranced around the scene.
Palin, Senator McCain's Vice Presidential pick, has reportedly embraced a study funded in part by oil giant ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute which sought to downplay the effects of climate change on "observed patterns in polar bear population ecology." Palin recently sued the Bush Administration, calling it "too accepting" of USGS data linking detrimental effects on the world's polar bears, a fifth of which are estimated to live in Palin's home state of Alaska, to global warming.
The August 4 lawsuit says that designating polar bears as an endangered species would "have a significant adverse impact on Alaska," saying that the move would "deter activities such as commercial fisheries, oil and gas exploration and development, transportation and tourism."
Video from September 3, 2008, appears below, courtesy of the Associated Press:
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